I'm pleased to announce RULFO (Rather Underrepresented Literature and Fine arts Open), a tossup-only open side-event to be completed by May of 2019. The questions are being written by Justin French, Anson Berns, Max Shatan, Vishwa Shanmugam, Jakob Boeye, Keaton Martin, Darren Petrosino, Mazin Omer, Shubham Sengar, and me. Literature, visual arts, and world music are being edited by Justin French; jazz and nonacademic music are being edited by Mazin Omer; and classical music is being edited by me, although we are all writing across categories. The set will consist of at least eight packets of 20 powermarked tossups with the following distribution:

Questions will be 8-10 lines of 10 pt Times New Roman before powermarking. They will be vanity-level difficulty, with roughly half of the answerlines extra-canonical and the other half easily convertible by most of the field. A conscious effort will be made to include more world content in the Visual Arts category (we decided to make a separate subcategory for world music but not for world art because world art is much more easily classified in the artistic genres we listed). In addition, music that falls under the western tradition but is from non-western countries will be classified as classical music. We will also try to ask about the "nonacademic" music in a way that rewards more serious analysis of the music, its performance, or its historical significance, rather than just easy listening.

We are aiming to finish editing questions by early May, when we'll have an online playtest; afterwards, we hope to mirror the set in high school nationals and various summer opens. Everyone, including high schoolers, is encouraged to play this, as they'll likely find new and interesting topics, as well as cool questions about works that are important but not commonly asked about in quizbowl.

Sites:

Online Discord playtest, sometime in May

Email me at zeebli123@gmail.com or PM any of us if you're interested in mirroring RULFO! The mirror fee is $10 per person.

EDITS:

Tossup length has been changed to "8-10"

Slight distribution changes

Addition of Max Shatan as a writer!

Mirror fee posted

Last edited by zeebli123 on Thu Dec 06, 2018 1:19 am, edited 2 times in total.

I understand that there have been concerns regarding the difficulty of this set, so allow me to clarify a few things:

The easier half of tossups is aiming to be deeper cuts of more canonical content. This is primarily to avoid having the set become oppressively difficult, but also is because I in particular believe that there are parts of subjects, especially music, that are especially important but usually deemed too difficult to be considered as a tossup, even if they are by, for example, a common composer. These questions should still be easily converted by the target audience while avoiding difficulty cliffs and "curved yellow fruit" giveaways.

The more difficult half of the tossups, on the other hand, is aiming to be about subjects that we believe are significant but have almost never come up in past quizbowl tournaments at any level. This doesn't mean that the tossups will go dead in every room; rather, many could be, for example, common links on very difficult, extracanonical subjects that become more easily converted near the end. If anything, the number of tossups that fall under this category will most probably skew towards the low end. We decided to call the difficulty of this set "vanity" because of this, as the goal of the set is to toss up new things that many people might find novel and interesting.

Finally, I would like to point out that this set is just a side-event; when beginning to form a team to write this, we were motivated by a desire to learn new things, have fun, and maybe show the community some cool subjects that they might enjoy themselves. That being said, we've already been working on this over the past summer, and will continue working hard to complete (hopefully) a well-edited set for people to enjoy. Thanks!

- The literature is double distributed. In addition to the geographical distribution in the announcement, we are also using a genre distribution. This is the overall literature distribution:

7 American long fiction
3.5 American short fiction
3.5 American drama
7 American poetry
3 other/mixed American
7 European long fiction
3.5 European short fiction
3.5 European drama
7 European poetry
3 other/mixed European
7 world long fiction
3.5 world short fiction
3.5 world drama
7 world poetry
3 other/mixed world
1 other long fiction
1 other short fiction
1 other drama
1 other poetry
4 other

- Immigrant literature is classified under the country to which the author immigrated.

- Approximately 25% of visual arts are set aside for "world" content

- The difficulty can best be described as somewhere between (college) regs+ and nats with some variance; it is certainly harder than Historature but much less difficult than Worldstar.

- At the moment, approximately half of the answerlines would be acceptable at regs difficulty. One to two tossups per round are "very hard" answerlines that serve primarily for canon expansion. The term "vanity" in the original announcement refers to these hard answerlines, but the majority of the questions in the set will be much more controlled.